Friday, June 15, 2012

Science Camp Fun and Freebie

I just finished a fun and fabulous week of Science Camp. I taught grades 1st through 5ht. Boy, do I have a new found respect for you 1st grade teachers. I wanted to share a couple of the lessons I taught and give you a little freebie. One of the activities was making a water cycle bracelet. I've seen numerous versions of this, but this is my twist on it. I made up a Water Cycle Dance for the little ones. We started out in a circle and made a circle with our arms to represent the sun, then wiped our brow because of the heat, slowly evaporated up towards the sky, shivered and condensed into a cloud (puffed out checks), pretended to be weighed down and began to fall to the ground,and clap out the sound of rain with our hands. Finally, we crawled back to our spot to represent the water returning to the oceans, rivers, and lakes. We did this a couple of times to show that the water cycle never ends. Click on the picture to grab of copy of the water cycle bracelet guide.

Attention! I'm so excited to have a great resource to add. Mrs. Plum from There's No Place Like 2nd Grade created a great printable to go with the water cycle bracelet. She said her students added it to their science journal. Love this idea! Click {HERE} for the printable. Make sure you drop by her blog and show her some love. Thanks so much for sharing with us!

Another activity was making liter bugs. First, I read the book The Wartville Wizard. This is a great book about a tidy old man that spent his time cleaning up the litter that the thoughtless slobs of Waterville left behind. The kids loved it. Afterward we made litter bugs out of trash.

These are just a couple of the dozens of activities we did. I will try to share more over the next few weeks. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer break.

Here's the link to the PDF on Google! I hope it's of some use. :) I had my 3rd graders color-code their writing and then illustrate their finished bracelets below this on their notebook page. I should have snapped a picture, but I totally forgot to!